52 pages • 1 hour read
Sophie CousensThe Good Part
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 29-Epilogue 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary
Roisin invites Lucy to come to Mykonos for the weekend. Lucy would love to go, but she sees that all the things she loves about her new timeline—husband, children, dream job—all require her to be present. She can no longer drop everything and take a vacation.
Lucy visits Mr. Finkley to invite him to Felix’s birthday party, and he is delighted to accept. He rarely receives invitations of any kind, so he is touched by this one. He asks Lucy to call him by his first name, Leonard.
In bed, Sam tells Lucy that the doctor wants her to go back in for a follow-up, and he and Lucy end up fighting about Sam being in love with a different version of Lucy. She is upset at all the things that she missed by skipping ahead in time. Sam takes her to the backyard to show her a tree and plaque memorializing their daughter, Chloe Zoya Rutherford. The baby only lived two weeks. Sam tells her that “The Pulse of Love,” the last song he ever wrote, was about love for the unborn Chloe. The pain after her passing and its negative reception by the public caused him to give up writing original songs. He says that it was Lucy’s idea to always speak Chloe’s name so they would remember her.
Chapter 30 Summary
Lucy does a practice run of the pitch for The House Is Going to Get You, but it goes poorly, and she is discouraged. She asks Michael if he will do it instead, and he agrees.
Lucy returns to Selfridges with her store credit vouchers and buys new speakers for Sam, presents for Felix’s birthday, clothes for Amy, and a watering can for Leonard. She stops in the food court for a croissant and sees a mother struggling with a crying baby and fussy toddler. Lucy steps in to distract the toddler so the mother can feed her baby in peace.
Felix’s school friends (Matt and Molly) and Leonard arrive at the party, where Lucy has constructed an obstacle course. Lucy reassures her mother that things are okay even though the laundry is behind, and she goes upstairs to put on her wedding rings, which she feels strange without.
The party is a huge success, and after the guests leave, Lucy shows Felix a lava lamp she bought to be the base of a new version of the beating heart project. They work late into the evening, perfecting it, and Felix is thrilled with the results.
Chapter 31 Summary
Lucy asks Mrs. Fremantle to allow Felix to enter his heart project even though the deadline has passed. They are both thrilled when Mrs. Fremantle agrees.
Lucy hurries to the big pitch meeting at Bamph Studio, where her company and Coleson’s will face off to save their jobs and earn a spot in the lineup. Michael is upset when he arrives, having discovered that his wife, Jane, is having an affair. Lucy has to do the pitch after all, and Melanie, Lucy’s boss from 16 years ago, is the final judge.
Coleson’s team presents a show in which children serve as their parents’ therapists. The presentation is slick and professional, but Lucy finds the concept disturbing. In between presentations, Lucy receives a message from Arcade Dave saying that he has located the wishing machine. Lucy had been looking for it in the wrong place.
Lucy goes back into the meeting to do the pitch. She makes it interactive, having Trey create monsters on the spot to represent the childhood fantasies of people in the room. She calls on all of her team members to contribute to the pitch, which was a different approach from the one they had rehearsed. The pitch seems to go over well, and Lucy leaves to find the wishing machine.
Chapter 32 Summary
Lucy rushes to the address of the newsagent’s where the wishing machine is located and sees the same old woman behind the counter; she says she was expecting to see Lucy again. The woman provides no concrete answers about exactly what happened to Lucy but does ask if she likes her new life. Lucy says that there are pros and cons and wants to know if she can go back to her 26-year-old timeline. The woman warns that if she returns to the past, she will not remember anything about this future with Sam, Felix, and Amy. She adds that Lucy can stay here with them, allowing her memories to return gradually, or she can choose to go back without knowledge of the choices that will get her back to this version of her future life. Lucy makes a wish to return, but the machine does not respond. The woman suggests that Lucy needs to say her goodbyes before returning to her old timeline. However, Lucy must hurry back because as soon as all the memories fill back in, she will no longer have the option to return.
Chapter 33 Summary
Felix is thrilled that Lucy found the portal but does not seem to understand the implications of Lucy choosing to take it. Sam asks them to come downstairs for dinner, and Lucy discovers that Sam and Felix have set it up like a fancy restaurant in which Felix is the waiter to celebrate the progress they have made. Lucy receives a text that the pitch was a success and that her company is saved. They celebrate and then send Felix to bed. Sam pulls out a cake that is a replica of one Lucy described to him on their “first date” in Chapter 18. Later, Sam asks her about her conversation with Felix about the portal, which he overheard. He wonders if she plans to leave and urges her to stay.
Chapter 34 Summary
Lucy panics about the memories returning to her, so she is hurrying to leave the house when she finds the remote for Felix’s heart project. She makes a stop to give it to him so that his project will be saved, even though time is of the essence if she is to return to her old timeline. The memories continue to flood back as she races to the newsagent’s. She makes her wish, full of emotion, and the wishing machine finally starts to work after a long pause, dispensing a penny stamped, “Your wish is granted” (328).
Epilogue 1 Summary: “Today”
Lucy wakes up in her apartment in her 26-year-old timeline as if it were the morning after the wishing machine encounter. She makes up with Zoya and then calls a roommate meeting with Zoya, Julian, and Emily. She suggests they all pitch in for shared necessities like toilet paper and milk and asks everyone to use the bathtub for bathing only. Zoya announces that she is moving out. Lucy says that she woke up just feeling like it was time to make a change.
As Lucy throws out her dying plants, she runs into Mr. Finkley, who decides to take them to his apartment. As Lucy and Zoya go to work, they overhear a song, “The Promise of You”—the one written by Sam that Lucy will sing the day she and Sam meet years later.
Epilogue 2 Summary: “Five Years Later”
Zoya, Faye, Roisin, and Lucy are out for a night on the town, vowing to always spend time together. They decide to go to a karaoke bar.
Chapter 29-Epilogue 2 Analysis
The Good Part has a cyclical structure, in which the narrative circles back to where it began—quite literally, in Lucy’s case, as she returns to the time and place she left after making her wish. This structure underscores the theme of Gratitude and Appreciation for the Present by bending time in such a way that the entire narrative seems to have taken place in the blink of an eye.
The structure also invites comparison that underscores Lucy’s character arc. Though Lucy does not remember her 42-year-old life when she wakes in her old apartment, she seems changed. She is suddenly able to solve her roommate problems and take control of her life, even with its difficulties. In Epilogue 2, when Lucy heads to the karaoke bar where she will meet Sam, the internal callback shows that Lucy made the right choice to go back to her timeline and live her life in order, experiencing the good and the bad.
Parallel scenes within the future timeline also indicate Lucy’s growth. For example, Lucy demonstrates her lack of mothering expertise one morning early in the future timeline:
‘Can you wipe her hands?’ Sam asks, throwing me a wet dishcloth, which I miss, and it hits the wall behind me with a thwack.
‘Mummy would have caught that,’ Felix says, his voice an awed whisper. Picking up the cloth, I try to clean the baby’s hands as best I can, but she’s still trying to hug me, so I end up holding her at arm’s length with one hand while trying to clean off the goo with the other. When I look up, Sam and Felix are both watching me with the same suspicious expression (94).
Sam and Felix are struck by Lucy’s sudden ineptitude with the simple task of wiping Chloe’s hands. Toward the end of the novel, the scene recurs almost beat for beat, but this time, Lucy asks Sam to throw her the cloth, which she catches “without looking” and then uses to mop up a mess that Amy has made on the floor. As Lucy becomes more comfortable in her role and as her memories come back, her earlier ineptitude with childcare transforms into practiced ease.
The motif of Lucy’s wedding rings serves as a similar index of her change. During Felix’s birthday party, Lucy has an “inexplicable feeling that [she’s] forgotten something” and only relaxes after retrieving and putting on the rings (295). At the end of the novel, she not only feels comfortable wearing them but also feels bereft without them. This is a significant change of heart from the beginning of the novel, where she recoils from wearing them despite admiring their beauty: “[An] old superstition niggles—you should never wear someone else’s wedding ring. Besides, it feels wrong, these weren’t given to me” (122). Though Lucy has still never experienced a proposal or wedding day, she has by the end of the book adapted to the role of wife and mother and in some sense become the “someone else” she describes in the above passage. Lucy therefore feels that it is now appropriate and even necessary to wear her rings. In particular, as symbols of her commitment to Sam, the rings suggest her less self-centered outlook and her heightened understanding of The Value of Family and Friendships.
Other lessons likewise correspond to the novel’s major themes. By the time of Felix’s birthday party, for example, Lucy has embraced living in the present. Roisin, who is vacationing in Mykonos, is no longer a source of envy because Lucy loves being in this moment with Felix. She has also learned about The Consequences of Wishes. When the old woman at the wishing machine asks her, “And how are you liking this new life of yours, the good part, where everything’s sorted?” (311), Lucy retorts, “Life is never sorted” (311), demonstrating that she sees that avoiding hardship is no gift, not least because it is impossible to know what the consequences will be.
